Karen Joy Fowler biography

Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler Biography

Karen Joy Fowler was born in February 1950 in Bloomington, Indiana where her father was a professor of psychology. She says "Bloomington lives in my mind as a sort of Oz-like place where I caught fireflies and watched lightning and ran around. None of the yards were fenced, so we could play games that covered massive amounts of territory." When she was 11 her family moved to Palo Alto, California.

She majored in political science at the University of California at Berkeley and had her first baby at twenty-three during the last year of her master's program (at the University of Davis). After completing her master degree she entered what she refers to as her 'child-rearing years' - until the age of 30 when she started to feel restless and took a dance class to reclaim some space for herself - as she says 'it was only after I realized that I wasn't going to make it as a dancer that I took a creative writing class in Davis."

She started to publish science fiction stories and made herself a name in the sci-fi community with the publication of Artificial Things (short stories). This was followed by the novels Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season.

In 1991, with sci-fi writer Pat Murphy, she created the James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award which, to quote Fowler, 'is presented annually to a short story or novel that explores or expands our understanding of gender...both to honor Alice Sheldon [the science fiction author who used the pen name James Tiptree] and to remind the field of its own importance in the continual struggle to re-imagine more livable sexual roles for ourselves.'

Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children, live in Davis and Santa Cruz, California.

Bibliography of Novels:Peripheral Vision (1986)
The War of the Roses (1991)
Sarah Canary (1991)
The Sweetheart Season (1996)
Sister Noon (2001)
The Jane Austen Book Club (2004)
Wit's End (2008)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013)

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Interview

Karen Joy Fowler talks about her bestselling
novel The Jane Austen Book Club.

In interviews,
what is the question you are most frequently asked?Whose point of view is the novel written from.

What's the answer?You need to think of the book club as a kind of seventh
character. It's a very flexible voice because sometimes all the
other characters are in the collective, but at other times someone
is disapproved of and therefore not in it.

Which of the characters in your novel are you most
like?Sylvia, because she is the one character whose children are
present  and children are omnipresent in my life. I also share
her sense of impending doom!

Sony have bought the film rights to your book. Who
would you cast, and why?I have such a strong image of the characters that I can't begin to
imagine who would play them. No one actor matches. If business
considerations could be put aside ...

Readalikes

All the books below are recommended as readalikes for Karen Joy Fowler but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose readalikes

In addition to co-authoring The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society with her aunt Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows is the author of the children's series Ivy and Bean, as well as The Magic Half.

Sara Baume was born in 1984 in Lancashire, England. She studied fine art before earning a Master's in Creative Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in the The Moth, The Stinging Fly, the Irish Independent, and others. She ...
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